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Question

Spraying powder through a pipe system

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
November 16, 2022
2 replies
622 views

Hi All.

I am trying to show the passage of powder/particles through an industrial process.

I have cutaway pipes and I want to animate the spray so that it travels through the pipe system. The pipes turn rounded corners and it needs to be a constant spray through the whole system. Can emitted particles follow a path? I have attached a jpg of the scenario i'm trying to recreate.

Any suggestions would be most welcome.

AJ

How to

This topic has been closed for replies.

R

Rick Gerard

Community Expert

It all depends on how fancy you want to get. This took about 5 minutes. I keyed out the orange, darkened a background copy below, added a mask to the top copy, and sandwiched a few small layers behind the holes I made in the drawing with CC Bubbles to provide the dust. CC Particle World II, even Scatterize with an offset applied, could be used to generate a simple animated dust that matches the design of the illustration.

3rd party effects like Particular can produce a much more realistic simulation, but the Illustration style isn't crying out to me for a realistic representation.

I've uploaded a project file that uses your uploaded image.

particles_in_pipes.zip

WakelingtonAuthor

Participant

Many thanks Rick, this could work for straight sections but not so easy going smoothly around the corners. Thanks for the suggestion

AJ

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Rick Gerard

Community Expert

If you put a solid layer or a shape layer below the Bubbles layer, pre-compose moving all attributes, then apply Puppet Pin to the nested comp you can bend the bubbles path. The layer below is necessary for Puppet Pin to generate a mesh, but once the layer has been bent you can turn off the bottom layer in the Pre-comp to give you moving particles with transparency.

You can then add a mask or a track matte to clean up the kinks in the pipe that may cause problems when you bend the pipe.

You can use this bend-the-path technique with any particle system.

I hope this helps.

Mylenium

Legend

This is nothing you can do organically and realistically in AE without resorting to commercial third-party plug-ins like Trapcode Particular or Stardust to simulate particles or a tool like BAO BOA (AEScripts.com) to bend stuff around corners. If it doesn't need to be ultra real you can of course piece it together from multiple instances of AE's standard particle effects or using an animated Fractal Noise that can be partially bent with CC Bender and other distortion effects. The problem with this is apparently getting the timing and density right so it looks like a continuous flow rather than individual segments.

Mylenium

WakelingtonAuthor

Participant

Great response thank you Mylenium. I thought that it would be rather tricky to do this in after effects. I have however just found a workable solution with particles and force field curve restraints in Blender.

Regards

AJ

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